Bitcoin Classic developer admits it: blocksize debate is just a powegrab excuse

[BillyBobZorton]

This is a war. XT, Classic, BU, you name it. They all want the power.

It's about giving the miners and a few people close to them the power to dictate the rules of consensus. Right now they're using the block size issue to seize power. And believe me, this entire mess is just a dry run for:

    -banning various network participants and blacklisting addresses (Mike Hearn)
    -lifting the 21M coin cap (Peter Rizun)
    -destroying competing chains via hostile mining (Gavin Andresen)

The main pushers of BU aren't very concerned about high fees and slow confirmation times, otherwise they wouldn't mine empty blocks. It's just a wedge they're using to split the community and garner power. The real goal is "emergent consensus", which is just a fancy term for letting whoever owns the most hashpower unilaterally implement whatever change they want.

No intelligent person in their right mind would support BU at this point.

[franky1]

It's about giving the miners and a few people close to them the power to dictate the rules of consensus.

segwit went soft and advocated giving power to the miners

   -banning various network participants and blacklisting addresses (Mike Hearn)
    -lifting the 21M coin cap (Peter Rizun)
    -destroying competing chains via hostile mining (Gavin Andresen)

bilatral splits - gmaxwell
millisatoshis - rusty russel
PoW algo change - blockstreamists


hypocrisy at its best

[Quickseller]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

All other entities that are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem can easily and quickly move onto various altcoins and/or other business ventures.

[smoothie]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

All other entities that are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem can easily and quickly move onto various altcoins and/or other business ventures.

I would disagree with this.

People who have invested into bitcoin as a store of value or have built their business around bitcoin have a vested interest as well.

Just because a miner has a more difficult time moving on to another business venture etc does not mean that they are the only ones.

One could argue that a bitcoin miner could sell off their equipment/assets and move on to other ventures/alt-coins/etc.

Not really an absolute type of statement I would agree with there.

[Quickseller]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

All other entities that are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem can easily and quickly move onto various altcoins and/or other business ventures.

I would disagree with this.

People who have invested into bitcoin as a store of value or have built their business around bitcoin have a vested interest as well.

Just because a miner has a more difficult time moving on to another business venture etc does not mean that they are the only ones.

One could argue that a bitcoin miner could sell off their equipment/assets and move on to other ventures/alt-coins/etc.

Not really an absolute type of statement I would agree with there.

The miners as a whole cannot sell off their equipment, and it would probably be difficult for a miner with as little as 5-10% of the network hashrate to sell off their equipment without taking massive losses due to oversupply.

I think it is fairly trivial for the majority of Bitcoin related businesses to either diversify into altcoins or outright change to an altcoin company. For example, most exchanges have diversified into altcoin trading. Your own business has diversified into physical coins loaded with XMR, and I suspect would continue doing well with other altcoins. I believe that most Bitcoin related businesses are more of a pro-crypto bet than a pro-Bitcoin bet.

Long term holders of Bitcoin have more of a vested interest, however liquidity for Bitcoin is much greater than liquidity for Bitcoin miners, so unless you are the largest of the large holders, you can probably sell what you own with little slippage.

[Oznog]

The miners decide the blockchain.
And the miners are directly linked to the market price for their own interest.
The interest of the miners is the same as mine: a good bitcoin, nice and cheap.
I trust the decision of the miners.

When the miners hit the table, everyone will understand.

[AgentofCoin]

The miners decide the blockchain.
And the miners are directly linked to the market price for their own interest.
The interest of the miners is the same as mine: a good bitcoin, nice and cheap.
I trust the decision of the miners.

When the miners hit the table, everyone will understand.

No.

The miners build valid blocks.
The validator node network (non-miners) decide the blockchain.
The miners are directly linked to the market price through exchanges.
The base interests of the miners is being kept in check by Consensus.
In Bitcoin, no one is supposed to Trust anyone, especially the miners.

Byzantine General's problem was that you CAN'T TRUST the generals (miners).
Satoshi designed an answer so we do not need to trust the miners.

Why is everyone saying we can trust miners now?

Everybody needs to go back to Bitcoin School and remember why we are here.

[andyatcrux]

"Miners are semi-trusted & serve at will of users. Users have full rights of self-defense when preponderance of miners behaving insecurely."  - Nick Szabo

(a few hours ago)

His twitter

[thejaytiesto]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

All other entities that are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem can easily and quickly move onto various altcoins and/or other business ventures.

Your premise assumes that bitcoin miners cannot get bribed to have opposite interests to what would be considered vested interests in bitcoin.

If you own the PBOC and you want to destroy bitcoin, and you have trillions of dollars and you can bribe the chinese miners into doing what you want (in this case, support a HF that will damage bitcoin's network effect massively and introduce dodgy software that will bring uncertainty), how does your thesis still apply?

Since global attackers with enough resources can bribe miners into going against bitcoin's best interests is a possibility, your premise is no longer valid.

Not to mention you are assuming miners are smart enough to take sound decisions about how to scale a network like bitcoin when as they have demonstrated, all they can think about is short term profit.

So again, someone with enough resources to pay the miners more money than they would make by being good actors with "vested interests in bitcoin" would easily make them do something that appears to be irrational if you don't consider the possibility of bribing taking place.

Your assumption of miners always having good faith and never possibly doing harm is delusional and naive at best.

[Sadlife]

So all of these is part of a big scam. Is the source of the image legit?
And so the bitcoin scaling problem is no issue at all?
In the end we're all like puppets that the big bears are fighting to be in control like china trying to gain control of this digital currency by bribing some miners in there country through PBOC.

[quake313]

The miners decide the blockchain.
And the miners are directly linked to the market price for their own interest.
The interest of the miners is the same as mine: a good bitcoin, nice and cheap.
I trust the decision of the miners.

When the miners hit the table, everyone will understand.

This must be one of them BU shills I keep hearing about 

[aarturka]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

Which miners? If we are talking about BitFury for example, you are right. But ask yourself where one chinese undergrade Jihan Wu got money to create his whopping hashrate empire? It's obvious that Chinese government is behind him and fully controls his actions. He admited it recently that someone's even writing his posts without his permission


And China doesn't worry to lose some money on asics, trying to get control of Bitcoin.

[ekoice]

This is a war. XT, Classic, BU, you name it. They all want the power.

It's about giving the miners and a few people close to them the power to dictate the rules of consensus. Right now they're using the block size issue to seize power. And believe me, this entire mess is just a dry run for:

    -banning various network participants and blacklisting addresses (Mike Hearn)
    -lifting the 21M coin cap (Peter Rizun)
    -destroying competing chains via hostile mining (Gavin Andresen)

The main pushers of BU aren't very concerned about high fees and slow confirmation times, otherwise they wouldn't mine empty blocks. It's just a wedge they're using to split the community and garner power. The real goal is "emergent consensus", which is just a fancy term for letting whoever owns the most hashpower unilaterally implement whatever change they want.

No intelligent person in their right mind would support BU at this point.

Yes,nothing is happening today for the progress of bitcoin.They are not really worried about transaction fees and more time for transactions.They are just mentioning this issue to grab the power.Whatever happens is not good for the progress of bitcoin.But we as bitcoin investors cant do anything now and we are just audience to watch this drama.

[franky1]

Yes,nothing is happening today for the progress of bitcoin.They are not really worried about transaction fees and more time for transactions.They are just mentioning this issue to grab the power.Whatever happens is not good for the progress of bitcoin.But we as bitcoin investors cant do anything now and we are just audience to watch this drama.

you (as a non-pool) cant do anything to stop segwit officially, because core went soft.

but for other proposals that are not soft you can.
EG if you hate segwit and you hate dynamics then just stick with core version 0.12

it wont do much for veto'ing segwit but 72% of pools currently are not flagging for segwit unless they see unofficially good node support.
but would show you dont support dynamics officially

if you hate dynamics but want segwit then run version core 0.13.1-0.14, its unofficially supporting segwit but would show some unofficial confidence in it, and it it OFFICIAL veto of dynamics due to officially reducing node count consensus of dynamics

..
if you hate segwit but want dynamics
the there are SEVERAL brands that are for dynamics BU is just one. but you can also tweak any othr favourite brand you prefer to be dynamicly capable

if you want segwit AND dynamics then theres bitcoin EC. or you can tweak your own core v0.14 to be dynamic and segwit accepting

[smoothie]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

All other entities that are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem can easily and quickly move onto various altcoins and/or other business ventures.

I would disagree with this.

People who have invested into bitcoin as a store of value or have built their business around bitcoin have a vested interest as well.

Just because a miner has a more difficult time moving on to another business venture etc does not mean that they are the only ones.

One could argue that a bitcoin miner could sell off their equipment/assets and move on to other ventures/alt-coins/etc.

Not really an absolute type of statement I would agree with there.

The miners as a whole cannot sell off their equipment, and it would probably be difficult for a miner with as little as 5-10% of the network hashrate to sell off their equipment without taking massive losses due to oversupply.

I think it is fairly trivial for the majority of Bitcoin related businesses to either diversify into altcoins or outright change to an altcoin company. For example, most exchanges have diversified into altcoin trading. Your own business has diversified into physical coins loaded with XMR, and I suspect would continue doing well with other altcoins. I believe that most Bitcoin related businesses are more of a pro-crypto bet than a pro-Bitcoin bet.

Long term holders of Bitcoin have more of a vested interest, however liquidity for Bitcoin is much greater than liquidity for Bitcoin miners, so unless you are the largest of the large holders, you can probably sell what you own with little slippage.

You may not know this but once upon a time I mined Bitcoin and was able to sell all of my equipment. I was nowhere near 5% of the network.

The nature of mining is something that has to be taken into consideration (both the pros and cons) before one decides to enter the industry.

If the risk analysis was not done properly or a contingency plan not put into place prior to entering the mining race, that can't be a reason to get any special treatment from the ecosystem as a whole should the effects of how things pan out (one way or another) unfolds.

We must remember that Bitcoin is so new that there are going to be many pitfalls. One of which may be malinvestment or failure to consider all possible outcomes in a risk analysis.


People tend to throw money at investments and business ventures many times without considering the risks.

[giga4less]

This is a war that nobody can win, so don't fight it. Hard fork should yield to SW, because otherwise no progress can be made. Once SW is in place and block is full again, push for hard fork and Core has to follow suit because SW is no longer an option. Decentralization determines that things can only be done one at a time. Right now both SW and hard fork are doing at the same time, and no progress can be made. One has to wait and yield to the other.

[Lauda]

I was already well aware of this being the case. Now he has finally, publicly, admitted to it. Zander, Peter R, Ver, et. al, don't really give a damn about the user experience. They don't care whether the mempool is full or not. Those are just lies that were fed to people to subversively attempt to gain control of Bitcoin. If BTU was supported by the economy (which it isn't) and became the *main* implementation, in a combination with the mining cartel from Jihan, could practically enable them to do whatever it is they wanted to do.

This is a war that nobody can win, so don't fight it. Hard fork should yield to SW, because otherwise no progress can be made. Once SW is in place and block is full again, push for hard fork and Core has to follow suit because SW is no longer an option. Decentralization determines that things can only be done one at a time. Right now both SW and hard fork are doing at the same time, and no progress can be made. One has to wait and yield to the other.

This is already likely going to happen. See this: BIP 148 UASF Segwit
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0148.mediawiki

[Oznog]

Why is everyone saying we can trust miners now?

Satoshi's original design is a proof-of-work protected block chain.

Nodes have a small cost. 40$/month/node and 4$/month/IP.
If the number of nodes influences something, explain me how and I will take control of Bitcoin this weekend.

In addition, if the number of nodes were relevant, the miners would organize to assume the cost and protect their investment.

Please, you must understand that the miners have the power.
They determine the correct blockchain.
And they can also override blockchain if they have enough computing power left over.

Corestream, markets and the nodes together can not challenge the miners.
The miners will defend their interests, which are those of all.

This crisis will serve to understand who has power and who does not.

[paul gatt]

This is an internal war, and it will have a lot of consequences for bitcoin. War is always bad, it should not happen. Currently, bitcoin is off, that is the immediate consequence we can see, I'm not sure what will happen next. But I'm worried, the bitcoin will go down even further. It is inevitable if this war lasts. Bitcoin is stopping in the race of the altcoins. And the candle it does not continue to grow, it will lose and collapse.

[dinofelis]

The miners are the only part of the Bitcoin ecosystem with a vested interest in Bitcoin.

All other entities that are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem can easily and quickly move onto various altcoins and/or other business ventures.

I would disagree with this.

People who have invested into bitcoin

No, these are the greater fools that were needed to pay for the joke, but they have now, in the mean time.